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well if you're cool with the myriad other forms of political indoctrination that any schooling--home public or private--necessarily involves--you know teaching stuff like civics or the rudiments of retro-nationalism and why it is pretty like an old car or whatever--then i really dont understand where any possible objection could come in with regards to some form or another of community service.
i dont get it.
none of the arguments that equate it with conscription or slavery make the slightest bit of sense. none of the scenarios that seem of a piece with this absurd general characterization make any sense either (no. 63).
what is strange to me is that the claims for home-schooling involve not a rejection of political indoctrination, but a desire to control it. this does not bode well for the ability of your kid(s) to be able to think for themselves. there are many reasons why homeschooling can be a very good thing indeed, but it seems to me that wanting your kid to be a copy of yourself politically aint one of them.
the problem is not so much that there are ideologies: the problem is that these ideologies are treated like natural phenomena out there in the world and in teaching kids in ways that follow from this position, you will probably not give them the tools required to think their way either through them, around them or potentially beyond them----your own least of all.
you'd think that if all this blather about "freedom" and "liberty" meant anything, you'd at least want your kid to have them----and allowing your kid intellectual freedom is a precondition for all other types.
and a measure of intellectual freedom is that at the end of the day your child may disagree with you, and quite profoundly----and you have to accept that. abusing the structurally authoritarian parent-child relationship in order to "protect" your child from political positions you dont like is just that--an abuse of power. you HAVE TO expose your child to a wide range of political options and you HAVE TO present information to your child in ways that enable the kid to learn to form judgments. you dont want to load shit up with your own politics--you'll create either servility (in the name of freedom of course) or incoherent revolt (what would that be?)--and will have no=-one but yourself to blame either way, because you are educating your child in the image of your own limitations.
if you go this route, you are imposing a miniature totalitarian education on your child. no doubt a quirk of that totalitarian education will be the fetishism of the word "freedom" and the word "liberty"---which would make of it a very typically american type of farce. in your desire to protect you kid from political positions you dislike, you'd end up recapitulating the main characteristics of the political order you reject, for whatever reason. if you aren't even self-aware enough to see that, i would really urge you NOT to homeschool your kid.
like i said, there are lots of reasons why homeschooling can be a great thing--but wanting to shelter your kid from political positions you do not agree with IS NOT one of them.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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